The Thing About Native Planets
by Cry-Of-A-Warp-Engine
Summary: Over a decade and a half has passed since the events on Pandora, the RDA has long since been shut down and all it's operations taken over by the newly formed Starfleet. Now, while on an at first completely unrelated incident, an Earth starship is about to once again unlock Pandora.


There were things that first officer Kacey Garret liked to do in her spare time. She didn't get that much of it, either from duty or being the first official first officer of a starship, aboard the NX-08 Advantage. So she treasured the little spare time she got.

At age 17, straight out of high school, she'd been accepted into the military and had quickly progressed. She'd lost both of her parents a few years beforehand, when the Xindi used a beam and tore a massive 1000 mile long and 50 mile side trench through Florida. While hiding in the cellar, her father had stupidly opened the door, the beam energy instantly flooding in. He'd been incinerated instantly, and Kacey and her mother had both received servere burns all over their bodies. Her mother died of the injuries on the same day, but Kacey survived her burns.

The rest of Kacey's childhood was empty, she'd been scarred by the event, physically and mentally. So when the time came to decide her future, feeling that few people would miss her, she signed up for the military, to which she was quickly accepted.

After being qualified for service, she'd spent 6 months in the African desert, then 9 months in Afghanistan. It was 3 weeks after returning home that she got the email offering her a transfer to the Starfleet program, which she quickly accepted. Within a week, she stepped aboard her first starship.

That was 5 years ago.

2 of those years had been aboard a Daedalus class medical ship, which she transferred from after it was heavily damaged by a Romulan ship, and she'd ended up on Advantage.

This was one of those spare times where she had nothing to do. So, she decided to look through the history database on her computer. She read many things, she'd just finished reading Admiral Johnathan Archer's book all about his days on the Enterprise NX-01, the first ship of the class that Advantage was of. With that now done, she wandered aimlessly through the database until she found something that interested her.

It was a file about the recent incidents with the RDA and the moon Pandora. The RDA was a non-Starfleet group, and therefor had no access to the now carefully controlled warp drive. Their trips to Pandora had taken 5 years each way, with them only having access to low speed impulse drive. The Advantage could make that same trip in a few days at maximum warp speed, warp factor 6.2.

NX class ships were made standard with a speed just over warp 5, but with recent advances in technology and high tensions with the Romulans, all out war on the brink, many NX class ships had been upgraded. Their engineering pod between the nacelle pylons had been removed from it's own pylons, being attached to a defined lower secondary hull much like that on the Daedalus and Yorktown class ships, to hold a vertical warp core capable of the higher speed. To take all of this strain, the ships had the outer sides of their lower hull casing closed, and hull plates an extra meter thick. These ships also had experimental shield generators, which the Vulcans had helped adapt to Earth constructed vessels. Advantage just happened to be one of these particular NX ships, the refit version now having the nickname 'Columbia Class' among personnel, since the first ship to receive the refit was Columbia NX-02.

The Pandora file interested Kacey. She read into it more, reading about Jake Sully and how he apparently turned his back on humankind for the Na'vi, and his new mate Neytiri. Kacey smiled as she read the name, she liked special names and Neytiri ticked that box.

She then read about the war, how the life on Pandora fought back against the RDA as they'd tried to drop crates of explosives on the spiritual trees of the planet.

 _'If they'd only had a few phase cannons...'_ She thought. It had been 16 years since the RDA abandoned the planet, things were bound to have changed in that time.

"Very interesting, huh?" Kacey jumped as she heard, realising she'd left the door open and had become so concentrated on the documents that she hadn't noticed Capt. Harry Vale enter.

"This is interesting... if I ever had the time, I'd probably want to end up there, see how it's all changed." Kacey says as she scrolled through some pictures, images of the forests, the animals and the beautiful sights. She stopped on one, recognizing a face... Dr Grace Augustine was still clearly recognizable even in her avatar.

"She had a face that stood out from the rest of them..." Vale says, Kacey looking at him.

"The time you spent there?" She asks.

"It was shortly before it all went to hell, I arrived on a Starfleet vessel which could outrun the RDA ships and was there to survey the arrival of the next load of soldiers... happened to be the exact load that Sully was on, I thought I'd been spiked or something when I saw him wheeling himself out of that shuttle, but there he was." Harry says, resting one of his hands on the back of Kacey's turning chair, the other on her shoulder. Across the 3 years, they'd formed a close bond together, the whole crew was like one big family and these two were the clear siblings of the family. No matter what, they always had each other's backs.

"One day... we'll go there again." Kacey says. Vale agreed, and the two hugged before he left the room.

Kacey twirled a few strands of her shoulderblade length brown hair around her index and middle fingers before getting up and walking over to her unit of draws, deciding to crimp her hair. While she waited for the hair tool to heat up, she found herself thinking about Pandora again, and how much she wondered what it was like.

She just had no idea it would be so soon.


End file.
